MINERVA CUEVAS

Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas’s extraordinarily
prolific and international artistic practice is grounded in conceptually
and socially engaged actions. Her site-specific interventions take place
in a range of settings from the internet to museums to the cultural commons.
She creates political and social interventions, produces compelling videos
and photographic work, co-opts various means of distribution to get out
her message, irreverently and cleverly tampers with corporate and government
identities, and makes bold political-creative work that disrupts political
and visual economies.

In 1998 she founded Mejor Vida Corp. (Better
Life Corporation), an enterprise that provides free products and services
such as international student ID cards, subway passes, lottery tickets
and barcode stickers which reduce the price of food at supermarket chains.
Cuevas also creates posters, billboards, and performances; with these
actions Cuevas has assumed the role of both a political and artistic actor.
Presently she is developing a series of works on the oil industry in Mexico
and Social Ecology studies re-adapting early scientific and optical devices
such as magic lanterns and microscopes.

Minerva
Cuevas, Not Impressed By Civilization, mural and posters, 2005.
Minerva Cuevas's performance and installation for the Walter Phillips Gallery highlights the relationships between Banff, The Banff Centre, and its surroundings. Through research on the history of the national park and The Banff Centre, Cuevas's performance and installation calls attention to the park's sometimes tenuous relationship to nature.
Created over a two-week residency at the Centre, Not Impressed by Civilization, like many of Cuevas's works, utilizes the gallery system to activate a public distribution. In this case, the posters, and the cake in the shape of nearby Mount Rundle, were distributed for free.

Minerva Cuevas, Dodgem, Installation, Mexico City amusement park, 2002.
Minerva Cuevas intervenes in an amusement park ride by pasting the logos of multinational oil corporations onto bumper-cars. Here she comments on recent energy politics characterized by a permanent war among the petroleum companies (referred to ironically by the artist through the aimless bumping of electric cars) looking to control the international markets with the ultimate goal of private profit.

Minerva Cuevas, "La venganza del elefante / The elephant's revenge," Installation Detail, 2007.
Cuevas installed thousands of bottles in a gallery setting, modifying the label of the Evian water bottle. All the colours, the design, and the layout are exactly the same, but the brand name has disappeared and the slogan Egalite subtly points out political issues linked to drinking water throughout the world. In another version of the project, posters were made and distributed and Minerva Cuevas, "La venganza del elefante / The elephant's revenge," Installation Detail, 2007.

Minerva
Cuevas, "La venganza del elefante / The elephant's revenge," Installation,
2007.
The "La venganza del elefante / The elephant's revenge" is an installation of a number of works produced by Minerva Cuevas in 2007. The series is presented as a visual essay exploring the deeply conflicted and often damaging relationship that humans have with the natural world. In this dense series she addresses both historic and contemporary environmental damage, and calls to our attention the human enslavement of animals.
Cuevas installed thousands of bottles in a gallery setting, modifying the label of the Evian water bottle. All the colours, the design, and the layout are exactly the same, but the brand name has disappeared and the slogan Egalite subtly points out political issues linked to drinking water throughout the world. In another version of the project, posters were made and distributed and Minerva Cuevas, "La venganza del elefante / The elephant's revenge," Installation Detail, 2007.

Minerva
Cuevas, Del Montte, Acrylic paint on wall, 2003.

Minerva Cuevas, Nuclear Winter, Billboard, 2004.
In this intervention into public space, Minerva reminds us that Nato's official military doctrine reserves the right to use nuclear weapons, posing the risk of the âNuclear Winterâ, a global environmental holocaust.

Minerva
Cuevas, Terra Primitiva, mural, 2006
In this mural Cuevas's narrative focused on a potbellied Indiana Jones--based on the martyred environmental activist Chico Mendez--as a survivor of a plane crash in an exotic jungle populated with snakes. A hanging light fixture in the star shape of the Varig logo referred to the troubled Brazilian airline. A much-publicized collision of two planes at 37,000 feet over the Amazon preceded her installation by a matter of days. Cuevas's design was rendered in collaboration with comic artist Maria Moreno of Ka-Boom Studio, Mexico City.